Author’s note: I had this written about a week ago, and even since then the amount of authoritarian measures taken by world governments has accelerated. Please, get a sense of what is going on here and spread awareness that this is not who we want to be as a civilization!
At some point, I hope to move on from discussing ‘roni-related issues. However, when you look at what is going on globally, the pandemic response is the biggest issue going on right now by a mile (or 1.609 kilometers).
To briefly recap my past points:
Covid is real and serious for a subset of the population, primarily those over 60 and with serious pre-existing conditions, but it has also driven us into a mass psychosis. Read more
The vaccines (therapeutics) may make sense for the subset at risk, but carries high side-effect risks, limited and declining efficacy, and many potential unknowns. Read more
But let’s move on to the abuses of power from various governments around the world, because hooo boy are they going at it! What they have done and gotten away with by using fear of Covid as the excuse should, well, create legitimate fear.
Let’s highlight some of the abuses (it would be impossible to capture all of them). And as you are reading these, please put yourself in a pre-2020 mindset and assess them from that framework. Also consider that these are not in-the-moment “two weeks to slow the spread” maneuvers, but rather conditions that are almost two years into robbing people of significant freedoms and quality of life.
Stop One: Australia
We have to start at the O.G. Covid-based human rights abuser... The once-and-current-and-future prison colony... The “Govern Me Harder, Daddy” of nations... China’s newest authoritarian testing ground…
Introducing… AUSTRALIA!
Sorry Aussies, I’m done holding back punches. What you’ve done to your own citizens is reprehensible, even if you have approval of the majority of your citizens. In fact, that just makes your actions more damning.
Let’s substantiate that.
Aussies have gone into lockdowns for much of the past year and a half. While they were initially successful at containing the virus, such tactics simply don’t work forever. Fast forward to now, and Melbourne has recently let only vaccinated people out of it’s sixth lockdown. The six lockdowns have cumulatively kept people stuck at home for 262 days or close to nine months.
It’s also worth noting that Aussie lockdowns are not like the lockdowns that happened in the U.S., even early on. Residents are regularly limited to 5 or 10 km radiuses from their home, enforced by police checkpoints. Here’s a handy tool if you want to see just how little freedom you have. To quote it:
“We have added a range of circles from 5km, 10km, 15km, 20km and 25km so you can check whatever situation applies to you currently, or see how far you can go under future rule changes.”
Many people have been fined or arrested for breaking their allowed radius, having friends come to visit their personal residence, or for not wearing a mask in public. Not content with just that, the Aussie government has simply seized the assets from people’s bank accounts.
Beyond that, Australia has also cracked down brutally on those protesting, and even monitor social media to find anyone who has indicated a desire to protest and send cops to their door. Here is a brief video from Rebel News that gives you some idea:
Beyond the shock and awe, Australia gave their police the power to hack devices, collect, edit, add, or delete your social media accounts all without any judge’s warrant.
I can’t put it too much better than Conor Friedersdorf did when writing in the Atlantic recently:
if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
The answer is an unequivocal “NO.” Despite the fact that these techniques seem to still hold popularity with a portion of Australians, being a liberal democracy is about protecting the rights of minorities (including minorities of thought).
These abuses of power aren’t something that a society can just walk back from. There can always be a next crisis. Once powers are granted, jobs are made and career interests ensure that such powers remain in place.
And if you don’t like the rules in the future, once the ‘roni is no longer an issue? I’m sure Australia will be able to repurpose their mandatory quarantine facilities for any political dissidents. Does that seem like hyperbole? Well, I mean, they have already called in the military to forcibly round up Aboriginals and send them to the camps. For their own protection, of course.
Stop Two: Europe
Admittedly, it’s hard to get any more dystopian than Australia, so the rest of this article may be a bit lackluster. Still, it’s important to know that the global authoritarian push is happening everywhere.
Most of Europe is now operating under vaccine passport or vaxxport rules. In all cases, this requires the vaccine to enter the country/cross international borders. Beyond that though, many countries have strict internal controls, requiring a vaccination to go to restaurants, bars, gyms, events, and various other outings. Austria has gone even further, implementing a full lockdown for the unvaccinated, with full police enforcement and steep fines if you, god forbid, go shopping (or leave your home for any non-approved reason):
Now, Germany, Italy, and others are looking to follow their lead. Other nations are reintroducing “2 week” lockdowns like Slovenia. But don’t worry, this time it’ll be just “2 weeks”, they promise.
Recently, Europe decided that vaccines expire after 9 months as far as their green pass is concerned. While they have not said that boosters will be the same, the inevitable path of Covid toward vaccine-escaping variants suggests that you will always be 9 months or 1 shot away from losing your freedom.
Unlike the U.S., Europe is applying this by smartphone app and QR code. Leaving aside the question of forgery (that isn’t endorsable as a long-term fix to this), what should really worry people is that this technology could be applied to anything else. Booster shots obviously, but it could just as easily be applied to restrict movement on the basis of climate change, the flu, or simply the whims of public officials.
And again, all of this is on the basis of, as we covered last time, a deeply flawed and experimental therapeutic that is ineffective after 6-9 months and has a very troubling (read: high) risk of life-threatening side effects.
Thankfully, many across Europe have been protesting this turn of events. However, these protests have been systematically ignored by the media:
Stop Three: Canada
Oh Canada. Our overly friendly neighbors to the north have also gone with hardcore lockdowns, and vaccine passports for any public travel or for employment. Meanwhile, the state control over media funding has been used to ensure that almost no opposition to these measures gets covered.
Perhaps the most egregious case which adds some new color to the tapestry of Covid-inspired authoritarianism is the case of Pastor Artur Pawlowski. Artur was arrested twice for the high crime of holding a religious ceremony in the time of Covid, and consistently targeted by the Canadian police:
Pawlowski grew up in Eastern Europe under the Soviets, so suffice to say he knows what authoritarianism looks like (and he’s said as much w.r.t. the current Canadian government).
Long story short though: Canadians who don’t want the ineffective and dangerous vaccines are now basically trapped in the country (they are not allowed on flights or to cross the U.S. border) without the ability to work and limited in their ability to travel.
Stop Four: The United States
As we arrive at the U.S., it is easy to be thankful that we are not in as bad of shape as Australia, Europe, or Canada. Still, the situation in politically blue states has been particularly bad, and with the arrival of the Brandon Administration we’ve been facing more and more assaults on our rights at the Federal level.
We’ll get to talking about one such blue state in a minute, so we’ll focus on the Federal level here.
While there has been plenty of dumb policy decisions by this administration. The most dangerous and authoritarian have been the vaccine mandates made for Federal contractors and then the attempted OSHA mandate for any employer with more than 100 employees.
Thankfully, the latter has already been stayed and is likely to be struck down in full due to the obvious unconstitutionality.
Still - the Brandon Administration is encouraging companies to implement mandates anyway and will undoubtedly try new tricks to coerce people (and kids) to take these therapeutics. And these policies have real harms. People are losing their jobs and others are being injured or killed by a medical treatment that they were coerced into taking. Please take time to read the obituary of Jessica Wilson, a 37-year-old mom of two in Seattle who died from the side effects of the vaccine.
Again here - let’s jump back to 2019 mental models: even one person who was injured or killed by a medical treatment that they were forced to take against their will in order to keep their livelihood would have been a moral outrage. It still should be.
And this attempted marriage of state and corporate power is incredibly dangerous to the general population. Again, we need to abstract this beyond just Covid. There are many other areas where an alignment of “Big Gov” and “Big Business” can be used for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many.
It is my strong belief that the actions of the Brandon Administration are impeachable offenses on this front. Hopefully we’ll get to see this in early 2023.
Stop Five: California
While California is technically part of the United States, it should be treated as its own country whenever possible. Indeed, some immigration policies should also be considered to protect the rest of us from their bad politics.
Just kidding, Californians! Geez, so sensitive. I wonder why…
Okay, okay, let’s wrap this up. California is the prime example of Covid craziness in the States.
Beyond the long-running lockdowns which only ended relatively recently, San Francisco and Los Angeles have implemented vaccine passport laws for the city. Perhaps not surprisingly, but disappointingly, the people of those cities (along with New York) have decided to roll over and take it. Like Aussies, many in California seem to like the “Govern Me Harder, Daddy” philosophy.
It is also with California that we should mention two other distinctly American blue state phenomena: closed schools and masked kids.
It can’t be overstated how safe kids are from the ‘roni. We’ve had over a year, so it is fair to use annual risk rates to evaluate. And it isn’t even close to being a concern:
Kids are 10x more likely to die from cancer or a car crash than they are from Covid. And do we take precautions against those? Sure, but do we radically reorient our entire way of life around those risks? No.
But the mass psychosis is strongest in Blue America, and the panic around kids has been there. Most Cali kids missed a full year (or more) of in-person learning, and even now any kid 2 and up is likely required to wear a mask all day because, well, psychosis. This part is fairly unique to us: even most of Europe isn’t masking kids under 12, and most of Europe was able to keep their schools open for the past year - two things true in Red America as well.
Last but certainly not least, Governor/Wannabe Dictator of California Gavin Newsom has pledged to make the Covid vaccine a requirement for kids to go to school. We covered this last time: the “vaccines” present up to a 200x higher risk for kids relative to the ‘roni itself, and 2nd shots have paused in Taiwan for 12-17 year-olds due to this risk as well as 1st shots for anyone younger.
This is your friendly reminder: state-sanctioned child abuse is still child abuse.
While that is far from a complete list of Covid Authoritarianism, I hope it gives you a taste. All of these actions would have been completely unfathomable by our 2019 selves. And the simple fact is that they still should be unfathomable and unacceptable.
Covid is endemic. It will be around in some form for as long as we all are. The government overreach will be as well until people rise up and say “No.”
Even once people eventually get bored of Covid, the threat of authoritarianism will remain quite strong. The tools are there (lockdowns, mandates, QR-based vaccine passports, fear-based propaganda, etc). All the government needs to do is to shift the focus. The likely target: the “climate emergency”. It’s already being labeled as a public health crisis and leading to suggestions that lockdowns may be needed to save lives. And the World Economic Forum is even out there touting MasterCard’s "DO card”, which cuts off your spending as soon as you’ve used up too much CO2.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put these Lego blocks together.
This may all feel conspiratorial, but all this Covid stuff would have felt that way even at the start of the pandemic. A quick search will reveal hundreds of papers and think pieces about how the lessons learned from Covid can help address the “Climate Emergency”. It’s the same people, the same quest for power, the same rhetoric, the same fear, and the same police state, and with no real end in sight.
The only time to fight back against this authoritarianism is right now.
Are you disappointed that I didn’t cover your region’s slips into authoritarianism? Leave a comment to add it to our documentation!
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